Off the menu: Do your kids ruin food?

I’ve often said that once I started going out with my wife, all of the mental energy I spent trying to hook up was transferred to plotting future meals. I’m not a foodie, but I love food, and consider any lunch or dinner that isn’t delicious a missed opportunity. When we go out for a meal, I don’t just pick the perfect meal, I execute subtle and devious mind games to trick my loved ones into ordering my second and third favorite choices, so I can sample from their plates.

Consider it karmic punishment that I have two children who completely ruin their food.

This isn’t about throwing food away. This is about taking a perfectly good meal, finding ways to sabotage it, then leaving the unappetizing remnants on the plate. And often the food destruction is done in camouflage. I go to finish one of their uneaten chicken fingers, and discover that it has been dipped in applesauce and mustard.

I was thinking about this the other day, as my 4-year-old shoved about 14 pretzels in his BLT. “I making it look like a birthday cake,” he explained, before blowing on the creation seven or eight times. Then he ate the pretzels, pulled out the bacon and then left the rest on the plate. With the pulpy tomato hanging out the side and the holes from the pretzels, the sandwich looked like a drive-by shooting victim.

This started with my older son, and was far less gross in the beginning. I remember thinking it was cute when he was 3 and wanted to mix his own drinks. It always involved water, sugar and food coloring. I never had a problem taking a sip. (A billion hummingbirds can’t be wrong …) Later, he tried smashing garbanzo beans to make hummus, and it kind of worked.

I think things went south when they started adding peanut butter to everything. Look in your pantry or refrigerator right now. There are five things that go fantastic with peanut butter, and 214 things that are an absolute travesty. I’ve outright banned the use of pickles by our children.

(Side note: I don’t understand why Oprah spends untold riches on professional chefs in an attempt to lose weight. She should just have one of my kids prepare her food. After one or two peanut butter and chicken sandwiches, she’ll be begging for the rice cakes.)

It’s especially strange, because kids these days seem way more adventurous with food than I was as a kid. In the 1970s when I was their age, Chinese food was considered a culinary stretch for kids. Along with their BLTPs, my sons will eat some Indian and Thai food, and will take Mediterranean food over cheeseburgers and fries.

I fight the urge to make them stop eating gross stuff, because as wasteful/disgusting as their creations can be, I feel like telling them to quit would be snuffing out their little imaginations. Plus, one of these days they might hit on something. I’m guessing that Paella was invented by a little Spaniard kid who was driving his parents crazy throwing everything edible object in the house into a pan. (“No, not the saffron! …”)

In the meantime, we’ve setting the 7-year-old up with cooking classes this summer. Meals All Over the World or something like that. Maybe he’ll become a food-lover too. Or maybe we’ll just be eating peanut butter gyros this August.

Do your kids ruin food?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimesoften never has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterHartlaub.